Women vets face own struggles to enter civilian workforce

Kate Logan wanted to get her hands dirty when she joined the U.S. Army in 2005. So the Oxford native became a diesel mechanic.

Fast forward eight years. Logan leveraged her military experience into a career that is just taking shape, as the mother of three (with a fourth on the way) wraps up a master's degree focused in health care.

She also still changes her own oil, she noted.

People often assume that after the shudder of mortar shells in Baghdad — the daily proving ground of a male-dominated workforce and marathon 15-month Middle East deployments — that a civilian life would be easy peasy.

They're wrong, Logan said.

"After all of that structure, I felt released to the wild," she said.

The divorced single mom found herself caught in a trap common to women veterans — resources aplenty, such as GI Bill benefits, but few she could use given her personal situation.

Women vets are also less likely to identify with their service professionally through military networks or translate their service into career opportunities, Logan and other woman vets say.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reports that women vets 18-24 are twice as likely to be unemployed than nonveterans of the same age and that less than 20 percent of women vets used their Montgomery GI Bill benefits in 2009. Woman veterans are also more likely to be married — and divorced — than nonveteran women and, like Logan, have children under the age of 17.

"I was scrambling. I had the military's education benefit but couldn't afford the day care to take the classes," Logan said.

Logan was one of the lucky ones, she said. Another vet helped her apply for a benefit that enabled her family to get by while Logan went back to school, joined the Michigan National Guard and laid her professional foundation. Now, as a sergeant in the Guard and a member of Women's Advisory Board for Oakland County, she wants to return the favor by helping woman veterans caught in the same struggle.

Just having someone who knows how to navigate the system and show you the ropes is a huge help, Logan said.

"Once you start eliminating the problems, you can find that balance," she said. "I just want to help these women get back on the right track so nothing is holding them back."

A growing number of women — they make up almost 15 percent of the active-duty Armed Forces and 8 percent of veterans — are transitioning into the civilian workforce. How to get this talent pool into stable jobs and keep them in Michigan is a priority of the Michigan Women's Commission, said Susy Avery, the commission's executive director.

The group launched an anonymous online survey this month aimed at finding Michigan's 50,000 woman veterans and learning how to better serve them, she said.

"All we have is the national data," Avery said. "We want to know our Michigan veterans and identify the services gaps. ... They've served their country and now it's our turn to figure out how to serve them."

Amy Courter

Detroit's Inforum Center for Leadership, with support from Cooper Standard Corp. and its Cooper Standard Foundation, is also reaching out through Next4Vets, a leadership program for woman veterans transitioning into the workplace. The center, too, is in the information-gathering phase, said Amy Courter, a major general in the Civil Air Patrol, a former executive at Livonia-based Valassis Communications Inc. and a member of the 1995 class of Crain's 40 under 40. Courter is one of Inforum's two lead designers and coaches in the program, along with Betsy Hemming.

Other national initiatives nurture entrepreneurship in woman veterans. The Women Veteran Entrepreneur Corps, a three-year business growth initiative, sprang out of Count Me In for Women's Economic Independence, a nonprofit business education community for women entrepreneurs, by way of the financial services company Capital One. The U.S. Small Business Administration's Veteran Women Igniting the Spirit of Entrepreneurship, or V-WISE, offers growth and startup courses.

Still, numbers are small. Veteran-owned businesses make up a slim 1.2 percent of all woman-owned business.

The National Women's Business Council reports there are 97,114 veteran women-owned businesses, primarily service-based in health care and social assistance (18 percent); other service industries (14 percent); professional, scientific and technical services (13.9 percent); and retail trade (12.9 percent). Almost 90 percent of these businesses are firms that the founder is the only employee, with average receipts of $23,143.

Heather Paquette

Part of the trouble particular to women is that they seldom leverage their military experience or networks, said Heather Paquette. She left the U.S. Air Force a decade ago, but has only recently connected to the word "veteran."

"I would tell people that 'I served my country,' but I never considered myself a 'veteran,' " Paquette said. The word brought to mind a picture of older men hanging out at the VFW whose service and experience were a world away from her own.

"It never occurred to me to go there to find other people like me," Paquette said.

Now a managing partner at Detroit's KPMG LLP, Paquette helps steer support incentives for company service members and veterans.

She learned many valuable lessons from the military, like when to lead and when to follow, Paquette said. She also learned the value of flexibility and attention to detail.

"You tell everyone when you're on vacation, when you're coming back and where you are," Paquette said with a laugh, adding that those combat zone details can seem like oversharing in the civilian landscape.